#284
Feb 25, 2024
Work
An opening came up a couple of weeks ago for a senior dev role on another team, and I threw my hat in the ring. After submitting my application I was given a description of the team and their major challenges and was asked to write a proposal to improve matters; the interview would then be a discussion of that proposal.
One of the team’s challenges was support burden, and another was meeting project timelines, I assumed they were related, but didn’t want to just assume, so I reached out to the manager to confirm. Then I spent some time looking through the team’s backlog, support tickets, alerts, and slack channels, and used that to identify some toil and come up with a proposal to make support less of an issue.
And I got the job!
The manager said that my approach, actually looking into the day-to-day experience of the team and writing a proposal tailored to that, rather than writing something generic, was what nudged me ahead of the competition. So I’m glad I did that.
My current team mostly deals with backend, batch-processing stuff. The new team is much closer to the users, there’s frontend, there’s a designer on the team, and the KPIs are all around user experience. It’ll be very different, but I’m looking forward to the change.
I’ll move fully to the new team some time next month.
Books
This week I read:
Volumes 1 to 3 of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe
I’ve been enjoying the anime a lot, so I decided to check out the manga too. It’s also really good. Something I’d not really thought about while watching the anime is that Frieren has a lot of montages: well, the manga has those too, and they stand out a lot more as you just get a page of different scenes with no dialogue, and they work well as an effective way to convey the passage of time, which is of course one of the major themes.
Roleplaying Games
ALIEN
We finished Destroyer of Worlds, and a fun time was had by all.
Overall, I liked the scenario, but I liked Chariot of the Gods more. I felt that Act 2 was fairly weak, the Act 2 / 3 transition was both unsatisfying and far too similar to the Act 1 / 2 transition, and Act 3 was harmed by splitting its focus between stuff in the colony and the dungeon crawl of Fort Nebraska. I ended up moving a bunch of the Act 3 events into Act 2, to make Fort Nebraska the entirety of Act 3, and completely redid the Act 2 / 3 transition.
We might do Chariot of the Gods in June, as the one player in the group who’s already played it (which was also ran by me) is away for a few weeks then. We’ll see. There’s also Heart of Darkness, which I want to run at some point too.
Next week, back to Arden Vul, with the players on the cusp of uncovering one of the great mysteries of the setting. It was the ultimate cliffhanger for me, I have been in so much suspense these past few weeks. If they just turn around and leave the temple without finding it…
Miscellaneous
I’ve been thinking a bit about how container orchestrators, such as kubernetes, work, and have begun trying to put a little something together based on etcd. Just a toy to see if I can create and schedule workloads, and build higher-level abstractions, like cronjobs, on top of a base of individual containers.
More on this later, if I manage to figure out how the networking part works.